Buh bye shadows
by RavenRamsey
Summary: when your afraid to touch reality can start grow dark but Rogues uses pain to keep that at bay.


For a moment, when the lashes paused, everything was so clear to her. Nothing escaped her. She thought, "this must be what Logan feels everyday."  
  
The moist leather cinched around her wrists had been worn rough over the last hours activities. It chaffed against her skin, rubbing the area raw and red. Sharp little tingles traveled in lazy circles. The hands above the leather cuffs felt swollen and throbbed. She had allowed too much of her weight to rest on the restraints again. The tips of her fingers had that buzzing, falling asleep feeling. Every now and again these tingles wold become sharp spikes, like a needle was pierced through the tip and into her bone.  
  
Below the cuffs the muscles in her arms were had long ago ceased to respond to her commands. When the cuffs let go she knew they would flop down bonelessly, smacking the floor hard with her body. The only way the pain in her arms and shoulders could be called dull is saying that being beaten with a sledgehammer is dull compared to being stabbed.  
  
A breeze brushed her back and she gasped, a loud sound in the empty room, echoing back at her. It was like she could hear every syllable of her surprise, pain and pleasure. The open wounds on her back seemed to twitch and contract at the air sending fresh courses of pain through her.  
  
But it wasn't precisely pain was it.  
  
No, not to Rogue it wasn't.  
  
It was a delicious ecstasy that went on for the million years of the half- second. That pumped the blood and tightened her nipples in the warm room. Trickles of blood tickled and caressed her skin as it rolled down the curve of her slender back, crawling into the cleft of her ass and seeping inside. Rogue could feel all this as time stopped for her.  
  
Her sweaty hair was plastered to her face, tendrils of it swaying before her face with her breath.  
  
This was the perfect moment. This is what she lived for. This one single instant when she could feel everything around her, when she became hyper aware and nothing was beyond her realm of feeling. Sure you could dumb it down with a lot of talk of endorphins and such but to Rogue it was simple a moment of peace. When she was one with her world around her and not outside.  
  
She was usually so cut off from the world around her. That's the way it had to be really, with her fucking power the way it was she had to be apart, never part of the crowd. Even in the crowded hallways of school, moving inside the mass of students, she was apart. The other kids even kept a wide berth of her, moving out of her way as she passed. For a short time she had even actually liked this.  
  
Until the shadows came.  
  
She barely noticed it at first, but slowly the people around her started to become less real. They became these ghosts passing in the halls and on the streets. Apparitions that didn't really exist, that even if she tried to touch them they would just pass through her fingers. It didn't really freak her out until it started happening with her only friends as well. She would be sitting in the common, surrounded by them and their noise and suddenly it would seem like their volume was being turned down, their bodies flat and false. They became as real as pictures in a magazine, talking moving pictures. Slowly this spread to her whole world.  
  
Everything she saw was a canvass that the world had been painted on. And the thought that froze her in bed deep in the dark was that if she peeked behind this canvass all she would see are shadows.  
  
She started seeing them everywhere, behind Kitty when she babbled at her in the morning, in class, looking out the windows.  
  
The world was losing it realness.  
  
She was losing touch with reality and that's really what it had to do with wasn't it, touch. Her mind started thinking that if she couldn't touch it then it wasn't real.  
  
So she had started cutting.  
  
For awhile it had helped but really after awhile it had become like masturbation, which she had stopped long ago because it was too frustrating. Rogue was sure that just about everyone thought she diddled herself all the time but that was so far from the truth. The fact was she had stopped feeling anything sexual long ago. She had locked that out of her head long ago to stop the pain of it. Most people would say that was impossible for a teenager but when you really can't do anything about sexual feelings it was best to just repress them.  
  
But back to the cutting. It was good for awhile but then the shadows came creeping back and she needed something else. Not to act upon herself but maybe for the world to act upon her.  
  
So she had gotten to work. Over the next few weeks as the shadows came closer and closer, she had worked.  
  
She had gotten Kitty surreptitiously to find ways around the danger room protocols, gotten Scott to show her how to create programs and Logan how to run them. Using all three so none of them would ask questions.  
  
So finally after careful questions and prodding she had her program, the one she had been using twice a week for the past 5 weeks.  
  
Over time it had changed a little. In the beginning she had various members of the team cutting her shallowly with a knife, the safeties taken off for the holograms. Then she had fights and then the one time she had actually had Logan spanking her.  
  
That one had been TOO good.. wreaked havoc with her whole "no sexy thoughts" deal.  
  
Finally she had settled on the one she now used. The characters changed but it was basically the same. One of her close friends cuffed her naked so she was dangling from the ceiling, her feet just barely touch the floor, and then whipped her. She had put quadrupled encrypted locks on all the doors so not even the professor could get in.  
  
These sessions usually lasted about an hour or so, from 2 to three am on nights when the dark seemed too dark. She only needed it every two out of seven days and her back and wrists were always covered after. The Moment was always worth the pain.  
  
Time crawled on, as the world welcomed her in. she could faintly hair the whip rushing through the air again, so slowly to her before it caught her back again.  
  
She screamed and said, "end program."  
  
Storm, the one she had chosen for tonight disappeared, as did the restraints holding her and she fell to the floor in a heap.  
  
She loved this time too. Lying in a pile of flesh on the cold ground, still burning all over. It was enough to make her cry.  
  
This was being alive!  
  
In a growing pool of her own sweat, blood and tears she smiled and whispered, "buh bye shadows." 


End file.
